Sermon Tone Analysis

Date: 2022-02-06

Audience: Grass Valley Corps ONLINE

Title: A Taste of Heaven

Text: Matthew 5:1-16

Proposition: Your actions teach people about God

Purpose: Let your light shine!

Grace and peace

Read to kids every night.

Usually a chapter at a time.

Often: “Keep reading!” Story doesn’t really confine itself to a chapter, does it?

Scripture is the same.

Story never fits into chapter and verse!

Chapters/verses weren’t always there.

Various ways of section off parts of the Bible began with Masoretic scribes in the 900s, but real, accepted chapters didn’t get implemented until the 1200s and it was 1560 before we saw Bibles with chapter and verse start to work their way into the public eye.

Less than 500 years ago!

Great for helping us find things.

Terrible for helping us understand!

Cut stories, ideas, sometimes even thoughts or words into pieces that only make sense when looked at as a whole.

Worse, sometimes sectioning the parts off can lead to missing the point of the whole entirely.

Three bind men are put in room with an elephant and asked to explain what it is.

Tail – Rope

Side – Stucco wall

Trunk – large serpent

Matthew, writing about Jesus, was trying to tell a long, cohesive story to show us a bigger picture than we can see otherwise.

What did we do with it?

Cut it into tiny pieces and give them cute titles which separate them from one another.

The big picture is much harder to see!

Today we are going to start in Matthew 5, at verse 1, but this isn’t where the story starts.

This is an explanation for part of the story Matthew is already in the middle of telling.

Here, let me start reading the scripture so you can see.

BTW: Using NIV 2011 today.

(Mt 5:1)

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down.

His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them.

[1]

Bible prob has heading on order of: Sermon on the Mount or Intro to Sermon on Mount.

Mt 5-7 is SoM, Matthew’s description of perhaps Jesus’s greatest teaching session.

Luke includes it too, but the heading there is Sermon on the Plain.

Scholars argue whether this was one teaching time or two or a whole bunch all recorded as one.

That’s a side effect of reading these pieces like they are separate from the whole story being told.

If this was really separate from the rest somehow, like if there was no elephant, but just its trunk, then that argument might matter.

But it’s not, so it doesn’t.

Look back at the verses I just read.

Jesus saw the crowds.

What crowds?

Look back to the end of chapter 4 (4:25):

25 Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.[2]

Why were the following him?

Go back a couple more verses to 4:23:

23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.[3]

And what’s the good news of the kingdom?

Go back a few more verses to 4:17:

17 From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”[4]

Put it together:

Jesus is preaching that the KoH is at hand.

We’ve talked about what that meant to the people of his day: That a time was coming when you needed to choose where you allegiance would lie – would you choose to live with the Rule of God or would you follow some other system?

Jesus was preaching that the Kingdom of Heaven – God’s reign – was breaking into the world.

The time for a choice is at hand!

He took this message on the road, traveling and preaching about it throughout the region of Galilee.

He brought evidence with him, bringing about the healing and wholeness that the LORD had promised through the prophets.

People from all over started to take notice, and they came together around Jesus to see and hear what he did and said.

What would it mean for them to declare allegiance to the God Jesus was preaching about?

What was expected of them, if they decided to live as subjects to the LORD?

So Jesus sat down to teach them.

And now we’re back to Matthew 5, verses 1 and 2, where it says those who came were his disciples.

What is a disciple, anyway?

If you’re thinking that it’s one of the twelve guys Jesus would call out to act as his apostles, you’re getting ahead of yourself.

Those guys get picked because there are too many people following to always hear Jesus’ message and he needs some folks to make sure everyone’s hearing him.

No, when Matthew uses the word mathetes (moth-e-tees) he’s referring to anyone who has followed Jesus to listen to his teachings.

That includes the committed, but it also includes seekers and the curious.

People who want to know what it would take to live in the Kingdom of Heaven.

So Jesus tells them.

Matthew isn’t giving us the background when he talks about Jesus teaching from the mountain, by the way.

Matthew isn’t really much for giving us the setting.

If I was writing this, I’d tell you about the salt tang in the air wafting up from the nearby Sea of Galilee.

I’d talk about the people crowding around and the noise they made and how they shouted questions and jostled one another as they tried to find a place they could see and hear from.

I’d mention the bored children playing tag while exasperated parents pled for them to just be still for a few moments.

I’d tell you about the clouds that would form and dissipate in the sky above them and how the locals kept an eye on them, watching for signs that one of the storms which were known to blow up with shocking speed in this area was on its way.

Matthew just tells us Jesus taught from a mountain.

But remember that Matthew is always pointing us towards the past, trying to keep Jesus in view as the Messiah, a great prophet, who was both of God and somehow also God, even though he was every bit as human as you and I.

As he shares that Jesus was handing down his wisdom from a mountain, Matthew’s original audience, First Century religious Jews, would think about the ways God has handed wisdom down to his people from mountains before.

And, for those of us who’ve held Matthew’s big picture in our heads from the beginning of his Jesus story, we would remember that he has repeatedly linked Jesus to Moses, guiding us to think of Moses as the model Jesus came to be the fulfilment of.

It’s like Moses was the small trick a magician does to say, watch, I can make this little thing happen, while Jesus is the follow up which shows the ultimate expression of that.

Like a magician producing a bird from a rose, then in a flash the bird becomes the magician’s assistant.

It sounds weird to us now, but that duality exists in scripture, starting with the creation story in Genesis 1, in which the universe is created, but then, in a way that makes the impersonal creation of the cosmos something very VERY intimate and personal, God shapes humankind out of dust and then breathes life into us with his own breath.

The same duality is seen in many places and many ways, particularly in the forecasts of the prophets, which often had a two-pronged fulfilment – one immediate and local in nature, one farther out and larger, more world-stage than back yard.

Moses received the wisdom of God on Mount Sinai at the beginning of the Exodus – the covenant that God’s people would be expected to live by.

And now Jesus is sharing the wisdom of God from a mountain – the new covenant which would govern life inside the Kingdom of God just as the old one governed life for those who wanted to journey to that Kingdom.

God laid out the broad strokes of his covenant in the Ten Commandments, which he gave us in two sets of instructions, one about who they were and one about what they do, then instructed all of Israel that if he was to be their God and they were to be his people, this is how they would live.

Jesus, in the next few verses, is going to lay out the broad strokes of his covenant in the same way, beginning with what we read in Matthew 5:3-6.

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 Blessed are those who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

5 Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the earth.

6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be filled.

[5]

We’ve given this form of blessing a fancy church name: a beatitude.

It’s an old, old form used to express a point.

Don’t’ lose your place here, but flip to Psalm 1:1 for a moment.